Maya Khosla (Mendocino Coast Writers Conference presenter 2007, participant 2008) sends this news from India. A message of renewal at the turning of the year.
Of Flight And Healing
This morning a peacock flew over my studio; yesterday, three alighted on
the roof. I heard their rush of chestnut wings. I heard the slam-and-echo, their
claws against baked clay tiles, their catcalls. Displaced yellow leaves twirled
past my window. I felt flightless, immobilized, consumed by shadow. Forget about
flight: I wanted the basics, one good foot in front of the other.
It’s my sixth week in a cast extending from the base of my right knee to my
toes. I’ve been hobbling from room to room with army-style crutches of steel,
underarm handles encased in cotton wool, wrapped with cloth and fastened tight
with duct tape. I’ve been sitting feet-up.
An invalid’s windows become world. Out there, tailor birds, tree pies,
yellow-footed green pigeons, flame-backed woodpeckers, jackals and occasional
blue deer come in search of cover, insect and berry. They move on. The living
world is all muscular roil and roll. Nothing can compare with the luxury of
fluid movement.
My last fluid movement was a sprint for a low black ball flying toward the
wall of a squash court. ‘Pop,’ and I went down. Someone, my squash partner Rita
or perhaps I myself, had slammed my right heel with a racquet. Except that I was
wrong. No one had hit me.
Driving, she raced me past street cows, diesel-pumping buses, women weaving
through traffic in small scooters, their long scarves tied to avoid entanglement
with spinning wheels. We pulled up at the front gate of the Indian Spinal
Injuries Center, which also deals with hurt knees, feet and arms. A uniformed
security guard handed us a pink parking slip. Two hours after X-rays and MRI
scans, Dr. Chawla, a young surgeon with a lab coat and a neat side parting,
pronounced it a complete tear. One of my body’s two strongest rubber bands, the
right Achilles tendon, had snapped.
A week later, I donned a blue hospital tunic front-to-back and Dr. Chawla
stitched up my rubber band. “No weight on this foot for six weeks,” he announced
when I awoke from the two-hour operation with a throat of sandpaper.
Blood tests, anesthesia, stitches, my single room and three day’s bland
hospital food came to a little under $1500—without health insurance. That, my
sister Anjali and Rita agreed, was the reason it was best I ‘broke my foot’ in
New Delhi, India, and not in the United States, where I live. Plus I had them.
It was true: they poured mugs full of water over my head and softened the tops
of my new crutches with cotton wool. And wheeled me out.
Healing is the longest phase of illness. Windows become blown-up
photographs, documentary films, world. One window looks out on a corridor of
trees. Three others overlook a jungle where understory and top canopy blend
together.
Scene replaces scene and none is for keeps. Parakeets turn the sky into a
wheel of green. Babblers turn a patch of earth into a trembling,
feather-preening ball of fluff. Sunbirds flicker, warblers twitch, Oriental
white-eyes flit in flocks like organized sparks. Feathered forelimbs swirl and
flash. With all this swinging, swirling movement, I have to practically hang on
to the arms of my chair to stop myself from falling forward. Locomotion is the
simplest output produced by a wildly complex set of muscles in collaboration. I
will walk again. Even dance.
It’s my seventh week and the cast is off. The cold season has arrived. I’m
walking without crutches for the first time. My movement is all jerk and sway,
arms held out as if I’m inside a rickety cabin on a speeding train instead of
outside on solid ground.
“Focus inward,” I re-hear the voice of Thu, a Vietnamese yoga teacher who
taught in the morning. “If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to breathing
and movement.”
I take a deep draught of air and lurch forward. Ahead, a flycatcher swoops
and arcs back up to its perch behind a shifting screen of bamboo leaves. I step
forward and raise my binoculars. Circle and back, circle and back: it repeats
the loop, scooping up insects.
By night, my windows are still as stone. Earth hurls through space. By
dawn, stone has burst into a thousand wings. The sun breaks through and its
leafy echoes, its million imitations, reach up with faces of gold, lime-green
and jade. Witnessing a miracle in the making, surely any beholder can shake free
of shackles. Already my amble flows smoother everyday. Surely anyone worn and
injured can be made new.
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